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Showing posts from February, 2021

Breaking The Westminster Duopoly

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Labour's sudden swerve to the right can't have escaped the attention of many. Under the hands of our dear benevolent leaders, Kieth "Keir Starmer" Stauner and Evans "David Evans" Almighty, party democracy and freedom of speech have both been reduced to the consistency of wheat-based breakfast cereals - utterly shredded. The anti-union, anti-worker, pro-corporate rhetoric is ramping up and the party is losing members quicker than a Tory can lose a pouch of party powder up their snot-locker. All promises and pledges have been all but officially reneged on and they've returned to the beige world of tinkering around the edges of capitalism. Basically, they're part of the establishment furniture once again; no vision, no ideas, no clarity but a room full of suits and fuck me if Kieth doesn't have a decent haircut! They are essentially no different from the Tories.  The only real difference is that they'll follow on through with the well-flogged-do

Why Doesn't The UK Guarantee Employment?

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One of the problems that have arisen during the pandemic is that of unemployment. Businesses are no longer able to retain employees, and many have folded altogether. Although the government's furlough scheme has helped retain jobs, it has clearly not been a total success and hence unemployment has risen by 1.2%, according to official figures. The official figures are questionable at best though, they don't truly reflect the scale of unemployment. The Office for National Statistics puts unemployment at 5% as of Sept - Nov 2020 , up from around 3.7% a year earlier. Because of the way unemployment has been defined, unemployment is suspected to be much higher. In other words, the government have fudged the figures. According to some sources, it could be as high as 13.2%! For those of us familiar with the corrupt whims of the Tory government, the fudging of data doesn't really come as a shock. There are really two types of unemployed people - people who are out of work and peop

Finance, Our Welfare and Class

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The recent debacle caused by a bunch of pissed off day traders gaming the stock market and hedge funds that rely on "shorts" to create wealth has blown open the contradictions of the stock market and its class nature. It is about time that we publicly had a serious discussion about the nature of these things. In case you've been living under a very cosy rock for the past week, here's the lowdown: a few small-time investors on Reddit realised that the shares for the US corporation GameStop were undervalued. After some investigation, they came to the conclusion that the stock is being purposefully shorted by a particular hedge-fund.  With me so far? Don't worry if not, thankfully some kind soul has already prepared a guide to the shenanigans so I don't need to go beyond my remit with overly technical jargon. Right-click the image and open in a new tab if you can't see it properly. The Game Is Rigged So now you hopefully understand the basics of the situation